The public feeling served their designs.  Religious troubles began to assume a political character.  In ancient Brittany the conforming priests became objects of the people’s horror, and they fled from contact with them.  The nonjuring priests all retained their flocks.  On Sundays large bodies of many thousand souls were seen to follow their ancient pastors, and go to chapels situated two or three leagues from any dwelling, or in concealed hermitages, sanctuaries which had never been stained by the ceremonies of a constitutional worship.  At Caen blood had even flowed in the very cathedral, where the nonjuring priest disputed the altar with the conforming pastor.  The same disorders threatened to spread over all parts of the kingdom:  every where were to be seen two pastors and a divided flock.  Resentment, which already displayed itself in insult, of necessity soon arrived at bloodshed.  The one half of the people, disturbed in its faith, reverted to the aristocracy out of love for its worship.  The Assembly must thus alienate the popular element, which it had so recently caused to triumph over royalty.  It was highly necessary to provide against this unexpected peril.

There were only two means of extinguishing this flame at its source:  either by freedom of conscience, stoutly maintained by the executive power, or persecution of the ministers of the ancient faith.  The undecided Assembly wavered between these two parties.  On a report of Gallois and Gensonne, sent as commissioners into the departments of the west, to investigate the causes of the agitation and the feelings of the people, the discussion commenced.  Fauchet, a conforming priest and celebrated preacher, subsequently constitutional bishop of Calvados, opened the debate.  He was one of those men who, beneath an ecclesiastical garb, conceal the heart of a philosopher.  Reformers from feeling, priests by the state, sensible of the wide discrepancy between their opinions and their character, a national religion, a revolutionary Christianity, was the sole means remaining to them to reconcile their interest and their policy:  their faith, wholly academic, was only a religious convenience.  They desired to transform Catholicism insensibly into a moral code, of which the dogma was now but a symbol, which, in the people’s eyes, comprised sacred truths; and which, gradually stripped of holy fictions, would allow the human understanding to glide insensibly into a symbolic deism, whose temple should be flesh, and whose Christ should be hardly more than Plato rendered a divinity.  Fauchet had the daring mind of a sectarian and the intrepidity of a man of resolution.

VII.